I got the animation system for my little stickman complete! it's a mess and not the best, but it's all I can do with the time I have.  I'm going to go ahead and make the animated tiles now

Ok i didnt realise that we had to do diary entries so heres mine... im making my game work. Simple :P

Due to me not being happy with the overall quality of my code, as well as the stress added as the deadline approaches, I have no other option than to resign.

However, I grew quite fond of the story of my game, as well as the isometric style I utilized in my game, I will with any doubt continue developing my game, I will add multiplayer elements, map editors, and artwork. However, that will be a 100% reboot, I won't be using Python.

This contest has got me more interested in Python in general, it seems much more capable than I originally thought, and it gives a lot of options as how to write code, the Python utilities and libs is in the thousands as I count from my repository:

madnick@northpole:~$ aptitude search python | wc -l
2726

That is quite impressive.

Here is some screenshots of my game:



So what was the story of my game?

"At the dawn of mankind... We arose the interest of several advanced alien civilizations
However, they could not agree about how to intervene with mankind. "How can we shape mankind", was the question on everybody's lips.
An agreement was nowhere to be found, so in order to save time, they all sent mutation probes, known as Monoliths, to stand by, while awaiting a conclusion.
However, a species known as the Himus, would not await any conclusion, they sent their own probes, not with good intent, but with malice. For they were determined to shape mankind into their own slave species.
At the peak of events, a great battle was fought through out the continent of Africa, for the sake of mankind's continued development. "

So in my game, the different colors of Monoliths is sent by different civilizations (a small reference to "2001: A space odyssey") The smaller Monoliths are the "Himus" they are an aggressive species however not as powerful as the others, but due to their planetary resources, they can build a large amount of Monoliths, whilst they are harmless to other Monoliths, they are not harmless to a young mankind, they will mutate mankind for their own purposes. Other monoliths will simply waste energy on these Himu-monoliths in order to destory them, if a Himu-monolith goes off the map, well, they all loose HP, because of how much resources they've wasted.

..

So thats it for me! I wish all you others the best of luck!

Right now the ability to add pictures to the text is added. A quick change in code and in the story backend did the job. Our framerate plummeted, however pygame.image.load(image).convert() instead of pygame.image.load(image) solved the framerate issue. 

I'm having trouble with the ragdoll.  for one, I can't get the image to be transparent... that's a pygame thing. and the image flipping to follow direction of movement doesn't seem to work anymore... that's an error on my part in the player code, I think.  any advice is greatly appreciated if you happen to have the time.

After playtesting Automata extensively, I found that the framerate slows considerably when more enemies are added. 1 enemy = 30 FPS running at 100% CPU, 50 enemies = 5 FPS running at 100% CPU. More tiles also slow the framerate down, from 9-10 FPS to 5-. FPS. I suspect that if the screen was almost filled with tiles and 50 or so enemies were on the screen, my game would run at 1 FPS.
:(

Right, I've added people in the game which you can collect to "save".  They'll follow you around until you get to the end. I started adding enemies who will chase you down if they see you but they currently don't harm you, only join your party. :)  Also fixed bug where the game will crash if you hit the 'g' key.  I will start to add more of a mutation mechanic to the mobs next.



Download link: Godspeed You! Mutated Maze v0.2

Now that I have scaled back my design, I think I can complete this game.  It may only have 6 levels (5 at absolute worst) but I can get it done.  I can also take this later on and make it into a platforming library, even a fully developed engine.  then all you need is a different res directory, or a launcher menu to select which folder to use... but I'm getting ahead of myself, what I need to do over the next three days:

day 5:
complete ragdoll (classes done, but some debugging and tweaking needs to happen)
add in animated tiles (need to use the same class as non-animated, but that's why I have such a nice tile system)
have tiles affect player (more attributes!)
add in player powers
add in doors and switches (doors are no big deal, and switches shouldn't be either)

day 6:
retile (redo all the tiles (might keep one or two...))
create levels, and level linking
add music, find sounds, add them (switch changing, door open/close, begin, you loose, etc)
playtest
if time permits: more levels, ladders, teleporters (big if)

day 7:
playtest
tweak
debug
rinse, repeat
upload!

"Move people, the corps ain't payin' us by the hour!" I'm goin' full speed ahead!

The user interface looks a bit nicer now, plants grow automatically, and there is a catalogue of the specimens you've created that you can select from.

Remaining to be done:

• Cross-breeding
• More plant features (flowers, fruit, colour variations)
• Sounds

There are also a few problems that need attention. Repeated mutations seem to always end up producing a stunted plant or one that doesn't grow at all; I might need to bias the mutations a bit more towards adding symbols than deleting them.

The scheme I'm using to render leaves could also do with improvement. The initial hand-crafted leaf looks nicely leaf-shaped, but mutations of it almost invariably produce something with a flat end.

Current screen shot:

Tonight, I spend most of my time hunting a pesky bug related to using class attributes instead of instance attributes in my classes. Since I am fairly new to python the distinction wasn't clear to me. It was hard to track down since everything was working beautifully until I made the slightest of change.

As for progress, the gameplay is inching its way forward little by little. I am going to hold off on any screen shots until I can replace the graphics (scheduled to be done Friday).